From fainting goats to paralysis, physiologist Frances Ashcroft explains how bioelectricity controls our every move, in The Spark of Life

ELECTRICITY controls our bodies. Every impulse, from those that keep our hearts beating to those that move my fingers across this keyboard, is sent from brain to muscles as an electrical charge.

Frances Ashcroft, a physiologist at the University of Oxford who specialises in ion channels, attempts to explain the body electric in The Spark of Life. She has a stock of good tales for the reader, but telling a "story about a special kind of protein - the ion channel" turns out to be far from easy.

The science of electricity in the body is dauntingly complex. Because we lack copper wiring, electricity is transferred ...

To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.

To continue reading this article, log in or subscribe to New Scientist